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Microsoft Program Manager Mistakenly Tweets Office 365 Will Be Rewritten in JavaScript (thurrott.com)
"A Microsoft employee claimed publicly that 'all of Office 365' was being 'completely rewritten' in JavaScript," writes Paul Thurrott, adding "And then all hell broke loose."
First things first. It's not true. So if you were freaking out that Microsoft was somehow abandoning C# and C++ for its most mission-critical offerings, freak out no more. It's not happening. So what is happening? A Microsoft program manager named Sean Larkin perhaps got a little overly-exuberant on Monday... he tried to clarify things in follow-up tweets when his original missive exploded intro controversy. Which shouldn't have been a surprise. And yet, somehow, it was...
[H]e finally corrected himself on Reddit, blaming Twitter's character limitations for his many factual errors. "We are not abandoning C++, C#, or any of the other awesome languages, APIs, and toolings that we use across Microsoft," he clarifies. "Nothing [in Office 365] is converting to 'all/completely' JavaScript/TypeScript."
Thurrott, a long-time Windows blogger, concludes that "getting something this big this wrong is inexcusable."
[H]e finally corrected himself on Reddit, blaming Twitter's character limitations for his many factual errors. "We are not abandoning C++, C#, or any of the other awesome languages, APIs, and toolings that we use across Microsoft," he clarifies. "Nothing [in Office 365] is converting to 'all/completely' JavaScript/TypeScript."
Thurrott, a long-time Windows blogger, concludes that "getting something this big this wrong is inexcusable."
...Office will be rewritten in FORTRAN, but they did not want to trigger panic.
And yet, Windows soldiers on.
Have gnu, will travel.
I care whether your programs suck. You can write good stuff in JavaScript. You can also deliver lazy-ass applications in JavaScript. That isn't determined by your language, it's determined by your management and commitment to quality.
[This isn't specific to Microsoft in any way.]
From what I can collect, the UI for O365 and other browser based tools in the future will be rewritten with a React/Electron/JS focus.
They're already in JS and HTML obviously or they wouldn't work in the browser. But right now those things are a mess.
I'm sure, and I don't know who assumed, that the server-side would be completely rewritten with a UI-oriented framework.
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There are people who are good at working, and people who are good at managing, but very few people who are really good at both. Technology people managers are sometimes not very good at understanding details of technology; but when you get out to project, program, and product managers, they are often very far removed from technology and are extremely apt to mishear what the team is saying.
This is not just Microsoft, this is company. Every employee has a role they are good at (or presumably so) but they are never good at multiple roles at the same time. At the level of program manager, there is no reason at all that they should know anything at all about how things are implemented, they've got so many diverse teams to be coordinated that they can't afford to know little bits of trivia about them at the same time.